Papers › Sample Efficient Preference Alignment in LLMs via Active Exploration

Sample Efficient Preference Alignment in LLMs via Active Exploration

1 Dec 2023arXiv:2312.00267archive 2025-07-28

Viraj Mehta, Syrine Belakaria, Vikramjeet Das, Ojash Neopane, Yijia Dai, Ilija Bogunovic, Barbara Engelhardt, Stefano Ermon, Jeff Schneider, Willie Neiswanger

Preference-based feedback is important for many applications in machine learning where evaluation of a reward function is not feasible. Notable recent examples arise in preference alignment for large language models, including in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and direct preference optimization (DPO). For many applications of preference alignment, the cost of acquiring human feedback can be substantial. In this work, we take advantage of the fact that one can often choose contexts at which to obtain human feedback to most efficiently identify a good policy, and formalize the setting as an active contextual dueling bandit problem. We propose an active exploration algorithm to efficiently select the data and provide theoretical proof that it has a polynomial worst-case regret bound. We extend the setting and methodology for practical use in preference alignment of large language models. We provide two extensions, an online and an offline approach. Our method outperforms the baselines with limited samples of human preferences on several language models and four real-world datasets including two new datasets that we contribute to the literature.

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